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Show -4- She asked for a picture of the father, and he hunted among the cartons in the basement until he found one. It had been taken during the year of his third attack, not long before the final one. She studied the father's flushed and heavy face, the puffy eyes, the vacant look of lassitude, and she could see that he, too, had once been a handsome man, with a face full of laughter. "Don't worry about it," he said, with an easy shrug. "If it happens, it happens, that's all." * * * * * She went to see his physician, alone. The man talked at length of vascular constriction and partial infarction and what hereditary factors might be involved, and then of dietary regimens and adequate exercise and, above all, periodic examinations. But in the end she had the feeling he had talked only in generalities, and had not answered her question. "What about my husband?" she kept saying. The doctor repeated his remarks on cardiac anatomy, and reemphasized the importance of preventive measures. Finally, with a certain annoyance, he recited a great number of statistics, reviewing all of the literature. But he told her nothing she did not already know. "Some individuals with his physical characteristics develop cardiac disease; some never do," he said. "We have no way of predicting what will happen in any particular case." |
